ipc-util

Provides simple cross-platform generic IPC message passing built on top of the interprocess crate.

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
ipc_util = "0.1"

Usage

Define your socket paths and a function that returns the correct path for the current platform:

use ipc_util::*;
use interprocess::local_socket::NameTypeSupport;

pub const MY_SOCKET_PATH: &str = "/tmp/my-socket.sock";
pub const MY_SOCKET_NAMESPACE: &str = "@my-socket.sock";

pub fn get_ipc_name() -> &'static str {
    use NameTypeSupport::*;
    match NameTypeSupport::query() {
        OnlyPaths => MY_SOCKET_PATH,
        OnlyNamespaced | Both => MY_SOCKET_NAMESPACE,
    }
}

Make sure the type that you want to send over the socket is properly de/serializable:

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
pub enum Message {
    Text { text: String },
    Ping,
    Pong,
}

There are three functions that can be used to send messages to an IPC server as a client:

• The send_ipc_message function connects to the socket and sends an arbitrary serializable object over it.

• The send_ipc_query function connects to the socket, sends an arbitrary serializable object, and reads an arbitrary deserializable object in response.

There are two functions that can be used to spawn an IPC server thread:

• The start_ipc_listener function is used to spawn an IPC server thread using a callback that is passed a LocalSocketStream directly, as can be seen in the stream example.
• The start_ipc_server function is a wrapper around start_ipc_listener, where the callback instead receives an arbitrary serializable object TRequest and returns an Option<TResponse>. When a response is returned, it is sent back to the client. This can be seen in the server example.

It's recommended to use start_ipc_server and its connection callback's Option<T> return type, where returning a Some variant will send that object as a response back to the client. This is intended to match up with the send_ipc_query function, which expects a response, while instances that return None to the callback will match up with send_ipc_message calls from clients.